I have been “mistaken,” “misled,” “misrepresented,” and been “unaccountably in error,”
and am sorry if you have been offended

Monday, December 03, 2012

Campaigning, “Calligraphy”, and the 21st Century

My good friend Michael
Cucek has posted images
of the handwriting of the eleven party leaders taking part in a joint press
conference at the National Press Club on Saturday. He has a brief
description of the role of the handwriting exercise at events featuring
celebrities and other public figures, so read it first if you haven’t done so
already.

Okay? Now…

The first thing
that strikes one’s eyes is the enormous variance in style and the sheer awfulness
in terms of proficiency. Mind you, with “sheer awfulness,” I am averaging out skill
levels that range from passable to permanent retinal damage-bad. Shintaro Ishihara’s
handwriting does appear to show vestiges of oriental calligraphy—it’s hard to
make out with the small lettering and the low resolution—but still little sign
that any training that he received as a child ever took. I assure you that had
a similar event taken place forty years ago, most of the participants would
have been writing fluidly and capably in the formal version of traditional calligraphy…and
doing it with ink and brush, not felt pen. In fact, a party leader with poor handwriting
might have called in sick and sent in a stand-in, except perhaps a progressive
or a Kakuei Tanaka-type, who could/would have worn the lack of skill as a badge
of their humble beginnings. In fact, it is telling that none of the party
leaders are embarrassed at their poor (felt-)penmanship. Martial arts and the
ethnic wardrobe are not the only traditions that the post-WW II world has confined
to the realm of the aficionado.

It is ironic that
Shinzo Abe, the values conservative, does the worst job of them all with his
angular, uneven, formless scrawling. Indeed, it is enough to make one wonder if
he does any writing at all. There is clearly a need here for real action in the
interests of traditional values; in the meantime, I will assume that he wrote
his book on his personal computer. Ah, yes, the keyboard. That, of course, is
why people can’t “write” anymore. Why I can barely sign my name, and it’s a
little early for you-know-what.

The second thing
to note is that the cardboards are sidelong rectangles, not the standard square
types that are sold in the stationary sections of retail establishments. The
sidelong rectangle must be a relatively recent media confection, almost surely to
better employ the TV screen in close-up mode. But the square remains the
mainstay of the demand for graduation and other farewell occasions, as well as
for celebrity autographs that are prominently displayed in modest eateries.

This,
incidentally, provides the jumping-off point for a plausible explanation for why
Ishihara wrote vertically, instead of left-to-right like the other ten, on a
sidelong piece of cardboard. He became the first true celebrity author of the post-WW
II era, long before he formally entered politics.* He and, perhaps more so, his
actor brother were superstars of contemporary pop culture. As such, he must
have written one line or other from his best-selling novels on hundreds upon
hundreds of square cardboards and affixed his name to them over the years. And
of course, novels—and the standard printed format for novels and many other manuscripts—remain
for the most part stubbornly vertical, as do regular newspapers and their weekly
magazine counterparts. Ishihara almost surely has rarely written anything from
left to right. Moreover, he most likely was personally unfamiliar with the
variety/talk show routine, where noisome hosts whip out oblong cardboard pieces
for the celebrity participants or party leaders to write on. As a
larger-than-life governor of Tokyo he could dictate his own terms of appearance
on the small screen, whereas he now has to endure the peer-to-peer ignominies
that national party leaders experience, even thrive on, on an everyday basis.

* The après-guerre and third-wave novelists generally received
much or all of their education during the long war (1931-1945) and were old enough
to be conscripted or imprisoned during that period.

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About Me

After graduation, Jun Okumura promptly entered what is now the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry and stayed in in its ecosystem most of his “adult” life. Along the way, he had pleasant stops in an assortment of Japanese quangos (Japangos?), overseas assignments and government agencies. After thirty years, though, it dawned on him that he had no aptitude whatsoever for administration and/or management. Armed with this epiphany, he went to the authorities and arranged an amicable separation; to come out, as it were. He is completely on his own IYKWIAS, but he and the METI folks remain “good friends.” He currently holds the titles of “visiting researcher” at the Meiji Institute for Global Affairs (no, that MIGA) and counselor at a risk analysis firm that dares not speak its name. This gives him plenty of time to blog or make money on his own. His bank account says that he does too much of the first, and insists that he do more of what he calls “intellectual odd jobs”. He wants to be paid to write fulltime, or better, talk—where the easy money is—but that distinction has largely escaped him. He really should not be referring to himself in the third person; he is not that famous.